I used to love the drive from a client’s house to the hospital (it doesn't happen as often now since I join my clients in their car for the drive). I would follow my clients, watching the labouring woman’s hand reach up to the roof of the car during each contraction. For me, it was an in-between time of calm and quiet watchfulness, similar to that “out of time” feeling I remember while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

One night, we had a long drive ahead of us. So, I turned on the radio and heard an amazing piece by Jeff Warren called "While You Were Out" about the changes in sleep patterns over the last three hundred years.

References to “first sleep” are present in Renaissance and pre-industrial writings. Only recently, researchers have discovered that our biological sleep pattern has two main cycles, “first sleep” and “second sleep,” with a two hour intermediary trance-like period, “the watch.”

After sunset, the family would head to the communal sleep space. There would be a quiet period of 1-2 hours rest in the dark, followed by “first sleep,” a deep rejuvenating state. This long wave sleep state would increase the levels of prolactin (ah, the breastfeeding hormone!) After 4-5 hours, people would enter an altered state of consciousness, induced by these high prolactin levels. Any breastfeeding mum knows the timeless trancelike effect produced by high prolactin levels - patient, waiting. In this period, people would traditionally pray, muse on the day’s events, or quietly make love, while listening to the natural sounds around them. Later, “second sleep” would come, full of REM sleep and dreams. They would all wake at sunrise.

This sounds so much like a typical night with a new baby. Hmmm... Rather than seeing the postpartum sleep pattern as unnatural, perhaps we should see this as the return to our natural biological state. Sleeping alone in a room devoid of sensory input seems to be an unnatural state for humans. Our North American need to mold our babies into beings who can sleep alone for long uninterrupted periods is, in fact, altering the delicate hormonal and chemical balance in our bodies.